Robert Motherwell @ Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London - A Survey of Prints

Robert Motherwell: A Survey of Prints
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
17 January - 29 February, 2020

Bernard Jacobson Gallery presents an exhibition of prints by the American Abstract Expressionist artist Robert Motherwell (1915-1991). The exhibition is the most comprehensive show of his editioned work to date. It assembles around 80 of his best prints ranging from very early experimental pieces, to images from the groundbreaking collaboration with Ken Tyler and the more intimate and rare editions produced in the artist’s studio. Unique trial proofs are on display as well as preparatory works for the colourful collaged prints.

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Robert Motherwell produced a remarkable body of work that ranks among the most notable achievements in post-war American art. In addition to creating his celebrated paintings, drawings and collages, Robert Motherwell was a renowned and innovative printmaker, producing more than 500 works.

Robert Motherwell first learned about printmaking through the surrealists, who having emigrated from a troubled Europe to the States had established workshops there for artists to work together and exchange their ideas and thoughts.

His interest in printmaking was re-ignited in the 1960s. Having worked in large workshops such as Universal Art Editions and Hollander Workshop and gaining extensive experience in the various printmaking techniques during this period, Robert Motherwell decided in 1973 to buy his own etching and lithography press for his studio in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he was able to work independently and unburdened by the constraints of a large, commercial workshop. 

During the fruitful collaboration with Ken Tyler Robert Motherwell introduced his famous Elegy to the Spanish Republic theme into his printmaking. Five of these rare and powerful images will be on display in the show. These are shown alongside light collages of wine labels, cigarette packs which Robert Motherwell created later in his life. 

 “I do not smoke Gauloises cigarettes, but that particular blue of the label happens to attract me, so I possess it. …For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.”

Robert Motherwell’s inspiration through literature led him to create many livres d’artiste. Robert Motherwell describes his idea of collaborating with poets: “My vocabulary works only with poetry, that is to say with non-narrative writing to which my visual metaphors can be matched with verbal metaphors springing from the same kind of source…not illustration, but a series of explosions of fireworks, or oppositely, a kind of restrained silence”, Octavio Paz who like Robert Motherwell moved in surrealist circles in the late 40s was through his psychic automatism in literature the perfect inspiration for this artist book “Octavio Paz. Three Poems” which will be shown in the exhibition for the first time. The 27 lithographs were produced sparing no expensive and had gone “beyond bookness” as Robert Motherwell characterised the ambitious project. 

This exhibition at Bernard Jacobson Gallery is a comprehensive display of the visual vocabulary of Robert Motherwell’s oeuvre. Elegies, motifs from the open series, gestural prints and collages show the wide range of Robert Motherwell’s art and the creativity in his printmaking which make him one of the most prolific and adventurous printmakers of his time.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
28 Duke Street St. James's, London, SW1Y 6AG
jacobsongallery.com

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Bruce McLean @ Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London - Five Decades of Sculpture

Bruce McLean: Five Decades of Sculpture
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
Through 29 June, 2019

Bernard Jacobson Gallery presents a special season of exhibitions, publications, film and performance, celebrating half a century of the creative output of Bruce McLean; one of the most important figures in British contemporary art. The season includes a two-part retrospective at Bernard Jacobson Gallery, the publication of a new book with essay by Mel Gooding and commentary by Bruce McLean and the premiere of a film by Bruce McLean and long-time ‘Nice Style’ collaborator, Gary Chitty, titled The Decorative Potential of Blazing Factories.

With characteristic subversive wit, in the early days of his career Bruce McLean created his own self-styled retrospective, with King for a Day at the Tate Gallery (1972). The genesis of King for a day was a seemingly contrary decision to stop being an artist, Bruce McLean explains, ‘I had heard that if you have a retrospective at the Tate, that’s the end of your life as an artist, so the obvious thing to do was to create a retrospective.’ 

Luckily for audiences and collectors across the intervening decades, this prophesy proved to be very far from the case. Bruce McLean has gone on to exhibit widely across the globe, including one-man exhibitions at The Modern Art Gallery, Vienna, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, MOMA, Oxford, Arnolfini, Bristol and GOMA, Brisbane and numerous important group exhibitions, including The Tate’s Conceptual Art in Britain 1964 – 1979. 

This special season also marks the long working association with Bernard Jacobson Gallery, forged in 1984 with his first one-man exhibition at the gallery. Five Decades of Sculpture presents some of Bruce McLean’s key works, including painting, sculpture, photography and printmaking – a range of work which might seems surprising and contradictory given the title chosen by McLean, Five Decades of Sculpture. Mel Gooding in his opening essay for the book which accompanies these exhibitions attempts to outline some of the seemingly simple guiding principles at the heart of Bruce McLean’s irreverence. 

‘What is a sculpture? To place some thing some where. A thing can be any thing. So can a sculpture.Any one is a sculptor. Any one is a sculpture. Any where. Any time. Bruce McLean is a sculptor. Bruce McLean has been a sculptor for a long time, in many places. Some times he has been a sculpture.’ Mel Gooding

Bruce McLean was often described as a conceptual artist during the earlier part of his career and featured in some of the most important exhibitions of the genre, including When Attitudes Become Form, at Kunsthalle Bern (1969), alongside artists such as Carl Andre and Joseph Beuys. Bruce McLean brought his own particular sensibility to the often arid and esoteric practice of conceptual art, framing his work within the kind of quintessential English wordplay beloved by poets from Edward Lear to John Cooper Clark. In Fallen Warrior (1969) Bruce McLean uses his own body to mimic the post-war heroism of Henry Moore’s bronze sculpture, Falling Warrior. Mel Gooding commented on Bruce McLean’s parody of Henry Moore, that he ‘is still quite capable of making vicious fun of the art establishment and society in general, and also get away with it. …I am quite sure that the giant sculptor was fully aware of Bruce’s photograph of himself lounging in a dozen Moore-like poses. It is utterly brilliant and hilarious’

Bruce McLean describes himself as an ‘action sculptor’ and certainly, the twinned activities of comedy and performance run through McLean’s work, the latter making full use of Bruce McLean’s self-professed aptitude and love for dance. It can be seen in the live performance work, High Up on a Baroque Palazzo 2 (1979) or in the twisting supine forms thrown by Bruce McLean in Pose Work for Plinths (1971). Even in the seemingly formal, 2-dimensional appearance of his paintings such as Red Wine Sea. The sculptural properties of gesture and movement required in the making of all art are fundamental for McLean. He says, ‘I don’t think of what I do as art. I think of it as sculpture. Even if it’s a painting, it’s a painting I made as a sculptor’

The ‘consistently inconsistent’ approach of Bruce McLean and his resistance to existing within the confines of what is usually considered high art, has given him  freedom to create across an incredible span of work; from the glam- rock personas of the ‘world’s first pose band’ – Nice Style, to collaborations with architects including Will Alsop and David Chipperfield. His painting has consistently won critical acclaim across the decades, from winning the John Moores Painting Prize in 1985, to inclusion in the seminal exhibition, A New Spirit In Painting at the Royal Academy (1981).

This is a mercurial 50-year career which sees Bruce McLean in his 75th year as energized, puckish and inventive as ever and this retrospective season is notable for also including completely new work. Specially commissioned by the newly relaunched Coronet Theatre, The Decorative Potential of Blazing Factories is described by collaborators, Bruce McLean and Gary Chitty, as a ‘cardboard motion picture – about ambition and the desire for infamy of an artist who wants to create the greatest landscape painting of all time’ 

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
28 Duke Street St. Jame's, London SW1Y 6AG
www.jacobsongallery.com

Robert Motherwell: Abstract Expressionism @ Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

Robert Motherwell: Abstract Expressionism

Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

16 September – 26 November 2016

Bernard Jacobson Gallery presents Robert Motherwell: Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition is an opportunity to investigate the various forms of abstract expressionist art from Robert Motherwell’s long and distinguished career through carefully selected masterpieces in painting and collage, including his great final collage, The Blue Guitar (1990-91) which references Pablo Picasso’s famous blue period painting, The Old Guitarist.

These remarkable works give witness to an era of unparalleled creative evolution, invention and energy in America, also demonstrated in the work of the Beat Poets and free jazz; a truly pivotal time in the history of 20th century art where the vanguard had moved from Europe to America as the predominant cultural force for the first time.

Arriving in New York from California in 1940 to study Art History at Columbia University, Robert Motherwell was at the epicentre of that seismic change, and sensing the heady atmosphere of experimentation around him, had soon dropped out of academia to pursue his overwhelming interest in Modernism with a full-time career as an artist.

Although younger than the other artists, Robert Motherwell was to become a cornerstone of the group later to become known as the Abstract Expressionists (or New York School) which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning - although unlike them, Robert Motherwell’s interest was exclusively for abstraction rather than beginning in figuration.

Robert Motherwell’s pursuit of Abstraction was in part influenced by his early interest and study in philosophy, honed with a post-graduate degree in the subject from Harvard University and later developed through his study of the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. It was his discovery of the principles of Surrealist psychic automatism however, gained through his friendship with Roberto Matta, that was finally to equip him with the physical process with which to create a new kind of dynamic, abstract art.

Selected highlights of the works on display at Bernard Jacobson Gallery include:

The Studio (1987) - A painting representing a recurring theme in Robert Motherwell’s art, which can be read both as a kind of self-portrait, as well as referencing Matisse’s Red Studio and Picasso’s The Studio, a work which Robert Motherwell knew well from the collection of Peggy Guggenheim.

Mexican Window (1974) - A stunning work from the Open series of paintings in which the artist returns to his 1941 trip to Mexico with Matta and his discovery of the ochre walls of adobe dwellings and the heat of the desert that was to continue to influence his palette thereafter.

Bernard Jacobson is widely acknowledged as an expert on the life and work of Robert Motherwell, publishing in 2015 Robert Motherwell: The Making of an American Giant, the first biography of Robert Motherwell written by Bernard Jacobson. Over the last 10 years Bernard Jacobson Gallery has held a series of critically acclaimed exhibitions looking at different aspects of Robert Motherwell’s multi-faceted oeuvre.

Robert Motherwell

The Making of an American Giant

By Bernard Jacobson

21 Publishing, 2015

This exhibition at Bernard Jacobson Gallery provides an opportunity for visitors to the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism exhibition to look further into the art of one of the key members of the Abstract Expressionist movement. The gallery will also have a one man presentation of works by Robert Motherwell at Frieze Masters this October.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY

28 Duke Street St. James's, London SW1Y 6AG

jacobsongallery.com

Kenneth Noland : New Circles at Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

Kenneth Noland : New Circles

Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

3 October - 5 November 2001

This exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery is Kenneth Noland’s first in London for 20 years and gives us a opportunity to look again at the career of this important artist.

Kenneth Noland is a major figure in American abstract painting. After visiting Helen Frankenthaler with Clement Greenberg in the late 50s he and Morris Louis developed the method of staining bare canvas with pure colour. This development gave permission for minimalism to take shape. The early paintings were concentric circles of different colours usually with a painterly flare on the outer edge. Subsequently Kenneth Noland used massively extended rectangles, chevrons flared shapes and surfboard shapes. Concerned with making apparent the fact of the painting itself without outside references he used symmetrical compositions where the shapes on the canvas echoed or were referential to the shape of the canvas.

For these new paintings Kenneth Noland has returned to a format which he first used in the late 50s, the circle in the square. These New Circles are, however, different to the earlier ones, the surface slickly painted, the colours vibrant but synthetic. They seem almost high-tech and forbidding in contrast to the inviting matte surfaces and warm colour of the earlier work. In some cases metallic paint is used in others a dichromatic paint giving the paintings an optical effect.

Now in his 70’s Kenneth Noland has continued to be influential to generations of younger artists from Frank Stella to the artist/critic Matthew Collings. A revival of interest in colour field painting has resulted in a target painting by Kenneth Noland from the ‘60s selling at auction recently for nearly $800,000

In critic Karen Wilkin's words "it is neither an overstatement nor an over simplification to say that his recent Circle pictures are like a diary of everything Noland has discovered in his lifetime."

Kenneth Noland is represented in many major museum collections throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY

14A Clifford Street, London W1S 4JX

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Glynn Williams, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

Glynn Williams: Echo
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
December 15, 2000 - January 27, 2001

Glynn Williams’ first london exhibition for 5 years features two remarkable new sculptures. The first is a massively oversized, fragmented still life of bottle, jug and cups. Carved in Portland stone the piece covers an area of more than 3 metres square and rises to nearly 3 metres.

The second piece “Echo” is an exact full scale replication of the stone piece; cast in paper. This material, which is new to Glynn Williams, has starkly contrasting qualities to the stone sculpture and give the piece a ghost-like fragility, a physical and visual lightness.

The two pieces fill the gallery space and due to their scale appear like ancient monumental ruins.

Although Glynn Williams is predominantly known as a sculptor of the human figure he has used the image of the still life throughout his career. This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue which includes the works in the show as well as examples of previous still-lifes dating back to the 1960’s. Simon Watney in his catalogue essay points out the associative similarity between the new still-lifes and grouped figures and in many of the still life works there is evidence of human presence or in some cases such as Still -life with Hat Coat and Shoes, absence. Glynn Williams has said himself “The human body is the centre of everything in art and most else”

Glynn Williams is professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art. He has written extensively on sculpture over the past 30 years and has exhibited all widely. His work is in many private and public collections including the Tate Gallery.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
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Ben Nicholson, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London - Major Works

Ben Nicholson : Major Works
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
29 June - 29 July 2000

To coincide with the release of the first, very revealing, biography on Ben Nicholson written by Sarah Jane Checkland, the Bernard Jacobson Gallery is showing a selection of important works from throughout the career of arguably the most important British abstract artist.The exhibition includes many works unseen in Britain for many years, rare works from the early 30’s and an important White Relief from the later 30’s.

Ben Nicholson was at the very centre of the international avant-garde of the 1930’s and 1940’s. His work at the cutting edge of abstraction. At this time he was working very closely with Naum Gabo and Piet Mondrian and it was Ben Nicholson who persuaded Piet Mondrian to come and live in London when things were looking bad in Europe.

From the forties onwards his career went from strength to strength. He represented Britain in the Venice and Sao Paolo biennales. His work was collected by every major museum in the world. He also became an influential figure on the British art establishment encouraging the, very reluctant, Tate’s purchase of abstract works.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
www.jacobsongallery.co.uk

David Bomberg & Peter Lanyon, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

David Bomberg & Peter Lanyon
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
3 - 27 May 2000

To celebrate the launch of the first major monograph on Peter Lanyon written by Professor Chris Stephens, a curator at the Tate Gallery, published by 21publishing, the Bernard Jacobson Gallery is exhibiting work by David Bomberg and Peter Lanyon. This exhibition features two of the greatest British landscape painters of the twentieth century. Their style and approach to landscape painting were very different, but they are united by an intensity of vision and purpose in their work and in their teaching and the influence this had on the artists who knew them and their work.

DAVID BOMBERG, once a radical modernist linked to the Vorticist group of the early teens, severed all links with what he considered a bourgeois and pretentious bunch in the early twenties and left England for Palestine where he started to paint in a topographical landscape idiom. From this new beginning David Bomberg developed his mature style. Taking a cue from Cezanne his painting became more and more about trying to get down on canvas the power and awesome beauty of the landscape of central and southern Spain where he now found himself. The work became more and more expressionistic as he tried to find what he called “the spirit in the mass”. His travels led him to Cyprus and later on in his life he returned to Ronda where he had spent perhaps his most fruitful time in the 1930’s. Time spent away from England was interspersed with less happy times back in London. It was here though that his influence was felt. He was a great teacher and through his teaching at the Borough polytechnic inspired many young artists, among them Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Beyond his immediate group, his influence can be seen in the work of Lucien Freud, and Euan Uglow.

David Bomberg died in 1957 tragically unrecognised by the Art establishment, despite the importance of his position to the future of British art.

PETER LANYON was a native of St Ives and a true Cornishman, this however did not stop him becoming perhaps the most internationally minded of his generation of British painters. He started his career as a pupil of Ben Nicholson and his early work is very reminiscent of his teacher. But after a major falling out Peter Lanyon rejected Nicholson and started to make paintings which were very much his own. He was in love with the Cornish landscape but very aware of its sometime violent side. His paintings deal with the mythical as well as the physical aspects of the landscape which surrounded him. He seemed to want to immerse himself into it. As his development continued Peter Lanyon's work became more abstract and often would appear to be a view of the land from above. It was this interest that led Peter Lanyon to take up gliding. This allowed him to see for real what he had been painting and also to allow him to immerse himself in the landscape of the air. Peter Lanyon like David Bomberg spent a good deal of time in other countries including Italy, Czechoslovakia and, perhaps most importantly, America where he had a good deal of success and became friendly with the Abstract Expressionists. As a teacher Peter Lanyon too was influential. He taught Howard Hodgkin at the Corsham School of art. And by his links to American art influenced peoples like Richard Smith and Robyn Denny.

Peter Lanyon’s life was cut short at 46, when he died in a glider accident in 1964.

Thousand of artists have subsequently used elements of the work of David Bomberg or Peter Lanyon as a starting point for their own work, it was these two artists who in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s set the agenda for British landscape painting right up to the end of the 20th Century and beyond.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
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Morris Louis, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

Morris Louis
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
5 - 29 April 2000

The Bernard Jacobson Gallery presents a group of major paintings by the American colour field painter MORRIS LOUIS.

At the age of 41 in 1953 Morris Louis was introduced by his friend Kenneth Noland to Helen Frankenthaler. Frankenthaler showed him her 1952 painting Mountains and Sea. The effect of seeing this painting was so great as to cause Morris Louis to destroy almost all of his previous work. The freedom this gave him allowed him to break away from the cubist style of his early work and to develop a technique of controlled staining which took him much closer to his professed love of colour in general and that of Matisse in particular.

In 1954 Morris Louis painted his first “Veil” paintings, as the title suggests these consisted of skeins of colour overlaying each other in a large veil like shape, being unprimed, the colour bleeds into the canvas and gives a sort of ethereal immanence to the paintings. The size of the canvas and the all over nature of the “veils” led to the term “colour field” being used to describe his paintings.

After producing the first “Veils” Morris Louis returned to a more traditionally Abstract Expressionist technique which he employed between late 1954 and 1957, he subsequently destroyed 300 of these paintings and in Winter 1957 began a second series of “Veils”.

In 1960 Morris Louis began the “Unfurleds” . These paintings used a more porous canvas which allowed greater colour saturation and the new Magna acrylic paint which had a more fluid consistency. These technical changes allowed the painting a new spareness in which the larger part of the canvas was left blank and each side has coloured stripes falling inwards towards the bottom of the canvas. In 1961 Morris Louis concluded the unfurled series and began to paint the Stripe series, these paintings were somewhat reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s “Zips” being in the main vertical columns of pure colour albeit on an unprimed field. These groups of work in which the material nature of the painting is very much apparent were influential on the minimalist artists of the younger generation who were at that time formulating their ideas.

Morris Louis was diagnosed with lung cancer in July 1962 and died that September, leaving behind some 600 paintings in his estate. Subsequently every major museum in the world has acquired works by Morris Louis. This is the first major exhibition of the works of Morris Louis in London since 1979.

This exhibition is presented in association with the estate of Morris Louis, represented exclusively by Diane Upright Fine Arts.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
www.jacobsongallery.co.uk

Derek Sprawson, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London - Pale Shadows

Derek Sprawson: Pale Shadows
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
2 - 26 February 2000

The imagery in Derek Sprawson’s recent paintings originates from accumulations of objects which are photographed and then projected onto the canvas often at a distorting angle. Using the projected shadow as a framework Derek Sprawson loosely draws the objects into the prepared surface with a freehand, doodle like mark, removing, to varying degrees, the recognisability of the objects.

The objects used include toys and organic matter. These items seem to inhabit the desert like environment of the flat ground. Sometimes appearing totally abstract, sometimes quite recognisable, these objects exist in a sort of mediated half state between their physical self and their representation. The colours seem to have a ghostly, shadowy quality and somehow do not quite relate to the colours we are used to seeing in painting or real life.

In contrast, the paintings themselves make one very aware of their physicality. The images seem to be almost knitted into the ground, each application of colour dissolving and blending with the colours of the layered under - painting. The mixture of oil paint with wax which Derek Sprawson uses gives the surface a softness and density and produces the effect of a a faint luminous sheen. At the same time it makes the work so physically sensitive that it brings out the aspect of vulnerability, tenderness and exposure implied in the painting’s forms and images.

Derek Sprawson is senior lecturer in painting at Nottingham Trent University. He also curates exhibitions. He won the drawing prize at the 15th bienale of Drawing and Sculpture at Caldhas de Rhaina in Portugal in 1995 and in 1997 was the invited artist at the Bienale where he created an installation of large wall drawings. This is his second one person exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery. Derek Sprawson’s work is in private and public collections in Great Britain and the USA.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
www.jacobsongallery.co.uk